Php – How to use PHP include to insert an HTML stub across all pages in a website

htmlincludePHP

I am developing a simple website. It will have close to 20 pages. It has a 3 level hierarchy.

Home
MenuStub
   Category1
      Page1
      Page2
   Category2
      Page1
      Page2
   ....
      ....
      ....

The main navigation will have 4 – 5 items representing each 'category'
This will be constant for all the pages. I am not even planning to
highlight the current category or anything.

Previously I decided to put the menu HTML stub alone in a separate file
and use PHP include to include it in all pages.

But, relative paths might be frustrating. Assume that the menu stub
file is located at the root directory.

So, in the root-level pages, the php include will read like

include "menustub.html";

in the second level pages, it should say

include "../menustub.html";

and in third level pages, it should say

include "../../menustub.html";

First, is this the best way to include a single file
across all pages in a website?

Second, if the website grows big, and many more levels
are added, maintaining this will be a problem. If I suddenly
decide to move an entire set of pages one (or several) levels
up or down, I should manually go and change the relative paths
in each file.

Am I missing something here? Is there a universal way to point
to a particular file, that every page will understand, regardless
of where it is located?

What is the best way to have a stub and include it in all the pages
without having these maintenance nightmares?

Best Answer

Common ways to solve this problem is either by using include_path: In your config, add the dir with such files to include path, and you can simply do 

include "menustub.html";

from anywhere. See http://se2.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.include-path It can be set from php.ini and in code. Not sure if it can be set in .htaccess files

Another way is to set a root directory variable and always use it:

include "{$rootDir}/menustub.html";

There is also the option of using auto append/prepend, which means you tell php to always append or prepend a file, see http://se2.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php (auto_prepend_file)

$rootDir can either be set from configuration, or automatically using $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']. The former is good if you use it for shared files (shared between several web apps), the latter for convenience if the files are located under one webapp directory strucure.

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